The languagelab library letter writing

Letter Writing


Benjamins Current Topics
Special issues of established journals tend to circulate within the orbit of the
subscribers of those journals. For the Benjamins Current Topics series a number of
special issues have been selected containing salient topics of research with the aim to
widen the readership and to give this interesting material an additional lease of life in
book format.

Volume 1
Letter Writing
Edited by Terttu Nevalainen and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen
These materials were previously published in the Journal of Historical Pragmatics,
5:2 (2004)


Letter Writing

Edited by

Terttu Nevalainen
University of Helsinki

Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen
University of Turku

John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdamâ•›/â•›Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Letter writing / edited by Terttu Nevalainen, Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen.
p. cm. -- (Benjamins current topics, ISSN 1874-0081 ; v. 1)
1. Letters. 2. Letter writing. I. Nevalainen, Terttu. II. Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa.
PN4400.L44â•…â•… 2007
806.6--dc22
2007004709
ISBN 978-90-272-2231-2 (hb : alk. paper)

© 2007 – John Benjamins B.V.
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Table of contents
About the authors
Introduction
Terttu Nevalainen
Power and politeness: Languages and salutation formulas in
correspondence between Sweden and the German Hanse
Seija Tiisala
Letters: A new approach to text typology
Alexander T. Bergs
Text in context: A critical discourse analysis approach to Margaret
Paston
Johanna L. Wood
Intertextual networks in the correspondence of Lady Katherine Paston
Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen

vii
1

13

27

47

73

Inside and out: Forms of address in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century letters
Minna Nevala

89

Yours sincerely and yours affectionately: On the origin and development
of two positive politeness markers
Annemieke Bijkerk

115

“The pleasure of receiving your favour”: The colonial exchange in
eighteenth-century natural history
Ellen Valle

131

Book Review
Susan Fitzmaurice: The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English: A
Pragmatic Approach. Reviewed by Monika Fludernik

155



<TARGET "bio" DOCINFO AUTHOR ""TITLE "About the authors"SUBJECT "Benjamins Current Topics, Volume 1"KEYWORDS ""SIZE HEIGHT "240"WIDTH "160"VOFFSET "4">

About the authors
Alexander Bergs is professor and chair of English Language and Linguistics at the
University of Osnabrück. His main areas of research include historical (socio-)
linguistics, language change theory, new media language, and the morphosyntax of
present-day English and its varieties. He is the author of Social Networks and
Historical Sociolinguistics (Mouton de Gruyter, 2005), Modern Scots (2nd ed.,
Lincom Europa, 2005), and the editor of Constructions and Language Change (to
appear with Mouton de Gruyter). After having finished a project on “The expression of futurity in contemporary English”, he now concentrates on the preparation
of a digital corpus of authentic, informal Late Modern English.
Annemieke Bijkerk obtained an MA in English Language and Literature from the
University of Leiden in 2001. Her thesis was about politeness strategies in the
opening and closing formulas of Jonathan Swift’s letters and those of his correspondents. In 2002, she spent some time at the Research Unit for Variation and
Change in English of the University of Helsinki, Finland, where she obtained the
data used in this article.
Monika Fludernik teaches at the University of Freiburg in Germany. She is the
author of The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (Routledge, 1993)
and Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (Routledge, 1996), and has edited and coedited special issues of Style (“Second-Person Narrative” 1994; “German Narratology” 2004), EJES (“Language and Literature” 1998), and Poetics Today (“Metaphor
and Beyond: New Cognitive Developments” 1999). She has also published in the
areas of postcolonial theory, the sublime, and prison texts.
Minna Nevala, PhD, is a researcher at the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts
and Change in English, University of Helsinki. She is currently working on her
post-doctoral project “We and others: The socio-pragmatics of referential terms
and expressions in Early and Late Modern English, 1500–1900”, funded by the
Academy of Finland. She is also one of the compilers of the Corpus of Early English

Correspondence (CEEC) and published her doctoral dissertation Address in Early
English Correspondence: Its Forms and Socio-Pragmatic Functions in 2004. Her
research interests include historical socio-pragmatics, text analysis, and editing of
letter material.


</TARGET "bio">

viii

About the authors

Terttu Nevalainen is Professor of English Philology at the University of Helsinki
and the director of the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in
English (VARIENG) funded by the Academy of Finland and the University of
Helsinki. Her current research focuses on historical sociolinguistics, Renaissance
English and the socio-pragmatics of letter writing. She is the author of “Early
Modern English Lexis and Semantics”, in Volume 3 of The Cambridge History of the
English Language (CUP 1999), Historical Sociolinguistics; Language Change in Tudor
and Stuart England (Longman 2003; with H. Raumolin-Brunberg) and An Introduction to Early Modern English (EUP 2006).
Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen is Senior Research Fellow at the Department of English,
University of Turku, Finland. Her major fields of interest are discourse linguistics
and pragmatics, applied to both historical and present-day material. She is the
author of Collaborating towards Coherence: Lexical Cohesion in English Discourse
(John Benjamins, 2006). Her current research deals with mediated interaction in
English from carriers and snailmail to the internet and e-mail.
Seija Tiisala, University Lecturer Emerita at the Department of Scandinavian
Languages and Literature at the University of Helsinki, specializes in lexicography
and Old Swedish morphology.
Ellen Valle is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English, University of Turku,

Finland. Her main research interest is in academic and scientific writing, particularly from a historical perspective. Currently her primary research focus is on the
writing of natural history in the eighteenth century, especially in a trans-Atlantic
context (between Europe and North America).
Johanna L. Wood is associate professor in English linguistics at the Department of
English, University of Aarhus. Her main areas of interest are in historical linguistics; syntactic theory; variation, change and standardisation in English; and theories
of language change. She is currently researching the structure of nominals in the
history of English.


<SECTION "art" TITLE "Articles">

<TARGET "intro" DOCINFO AUTHOR "Terttu Nevalainen"TITLE "Introduction"SUBJECT "JHP, Volume 5:2"KEYWORDS ""SIZE HEIGHT "240"WIDTH "160"VOFFSET "1">

Introduction
Terttu Nevalainen
University of Helsinki

1.

On the history of letter writing

Letter writing has always been situated activity. Take, for instance, the following
translation of a cuneiform letter despatched over 3700 years ago. The writer, BahdiLim, was the prefect of the royal palace of Mari and the recipient, my lord, was
Zimri-Lim, the last king of Mari (1779–1757 B.C.), the ancient Mesopotamian city
and kingdom situated on the Euphrates River. The letter was written to accompany
another letter containing a message from a female prophet.1
(1) Speak to my lord: Thus Bahdi-Lim, your servant:
The city of Mari, the palace and the district are well. Another matter: Ahum,
the priest, has brought me the hair and the garment fringe of a prophetess,
and her complete report is written on the tablet that Ahum has sent to my

lord. Herewith I have conveyed the tablet of Ahum together with the hair
and a fringe of the garment of the prophetess to my lord.
(ARM 26 201; translation from Akkadian by Nissinen (2003: 34))

To the extent that there are universals in letter writing, they would include at least
the following. A letter consists of written communication typically addressed to one
or more named recipients, and identifies the sender and conveys a message; even
if it is just to say that the message (including its authentication!) is included in an
enclosure, as is the case in (1).
The material circumstances of letter writing have naturally changed with time,
as have its discursive practices. A basic means of written communication, letter
writing has contributed to the rise of other, more specialised genres intended for
larger audiences such as the newspaper, the scientific article and the epistolary
novel (Beebee 1999, Raymond, ed., 2002, Valle 1999). Specialisation as such is not
a recent phenomenon in the history of letter writing, which has generated diverse
epistolary subgenres ranging from the New Testament letters to medieval verse love
epistles (Camargo 1991).
As a written genre, letter writing has to be learned. In the past its basic princi-


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Terttu Nevalainen

ples were to be mastered at an early age, particularly by those who received a
classical education. Teachers of ars dictaminis, the medieval art of letter writing,
compiled model letters which were widely copied, taught and assimilated throughout western Europe from the eleventh century onwards. Their principles can be
traced back to Roman times (or perhaps even to Mesopotamia, as suggested by the
sources consulted by Tiisala in her contribution to this volume). Their direct
influence began to fade partly because of the classical models introduced during

the Renaissance and partly because of the widening social base of writers, whose
needs often centred on business formats such as the letter of credit and letters of
sale or quittance (Camargo 2001, Nevalainen 2001, Richardson 2001, van Houdt
et al., eds., 2002).
In the sixteenth century, letter-writing advice of various kinds started to appear
in printed manuals, which became a means of disseminating epistolary conventions
in European vernaculars. Their influence on the actual letter-writing activity is
difficult to assess, but it must have varied greatly (Austin 1973 [1998]). Chartier
(1997: 7) notes with reference to the heyday of these manuals in nineteenth-century
France that:
(2) The educational purpose which quite evidently underpinned the large-scale
spread of model-letters in no way implies that all their purchasers, or even a
majority of them, became letter-writers who complied with the conventions
they had been taught, or even that they ever wrote a single letter.

Comments like this leave the door open for research into the various situated
aspects of letter writing in the past.

2. The language of letters
Letters provide material for the study of language variation and change in the past.
It may be argued, for instance, that official correspondence has had a key role in
setting written language norms in many language communities. This appears to
have been the case with English and German in the fifteenth century (Deumert
and Vandenbussche, eds., 2003). In England the Signet Office, which was the
King’s personal writing office, de facto selected the language variety to be disseminated by royal missives throughout the country in the early fifteenth century
(Benskin 1992).
By contrast, personal letters written by people without access to formal
education, notably women, have provided data on various aspects of pronunciation
at a time when the standard spelling system made texts regionally unlocalisable.
They were used by H.C. Wyld (1936) to illustrate the extent to which the “Modified

Introduction

Standard” pronunciation of English varied between the fifteenth and eighteenth
centuries. More recently, women’s letters have supplied material for antedating one
of the major changes in the pronunciation of Middle Scots (Meurman-Solin 2000).
The language of personal letters has also been compared with and contrasted
to other genres of writing in the history of both British and American English.
Many studies over the last ten or fifteen years have been corpus-based and have
made use of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (HC) and the ARCHER Corpus
(Rissanen et al., eds., 1997, Conrad and Biber, eds., 2001). Taken together, these
corpora contain letters from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. The studies
typically place personal letters in the oral or, in Biber’s terms, involved category,
closer to comedies and fiction than to such literate genres as official documents,
sermons, religious treatises and academic prose.
Personal letters have similarly formed the basis for reconstructing the sociolinguistic contexts of language change. Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg
(2003) investigate fourteen processes of language change in Tudor and Stuart
England from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. The social variables they
focus on include the age, social status, gender and regional background of 778
individuals in the electronic Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC).
Region and gender are shown to be the most relevant factors in the majority of the
linguistic changes studied.

3. Widening perspectives
The contributions to this volume discuss letter writing from 1400 to 1800.2 They
both extend and complement the traditional agenda of letter-writing research in the
history of European languages, which approaches the topic from a largely rhetorical
perspective. Using corpus-linguistic techniques, these articles bring a set of pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches to bear on historical letter-writing activity.
3.1 Medieval ars dictaminis and language contact

Fading though the influence of ars dictaminis may have been in Renaissance
Europe, it continued to provide the general code of politeness for official correspondence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This appears to have been
particularly the case when letters were exchanged in a language which was not the
mother tongue of all the corresponding parties.
Seija Tiisala’s article discusses the degree to which the dictates of ars dictaminis
were followed in late medieval Hanseatic correspondence. She discusses the official
and semi-official letters exchanged between the Swedish authorities and the Hanse

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councils and merchants in northern Baltic Europe from the mid fourteenth century
to the first decades of the sixteenth century. Three languages were used in these
letters: Latin, Low German and Swedish, but the dominant lingua franca was Low
German. Because of the low level of literacy of the correspondents, it was customary for secretaries to read the messages aloud to the recipients. Low German was
preferred to Latin, whose influence had begun to diminish in Hanseatic Northern
Europe from the thirteenth century onwards.
The Latin-based rules of letter writing were nevertheless followed in these
epistles. Tiisala notes that they may not have been as strict as those applied to
charters (i.e., letters with legal consequences), the most common kind of document found in the Hanse archives, but that they were clearly in evidence, for
instance, in salutation formulae. The salutation of a letter specified the sender, the
recipient and the manner and quality of greeting. Senders and recipients were
placed in three social categories, high (kings, bishops), middle (nobility, bailiffs,
feoffees) and low (clerks, scholars, burghers and merchants). Summae dictaminis
laid down the principles of polite salutation for each category, and included
prescriptions on the right kind and number of adjectives expressing praise

(‘noble’, ‘wise’, ‘honoured’, ‘honest’, ‘good’, ‘able’, etc.). One of the effects of this
long-term language-contact situation was the many politeness expressions
borrowed from Low German into Swedish.
3.2 Socio-pragmatic subtypes of letters
How to classify texts by type was one of concerns of classical rhetoricians, and the
question reappeared in Renaissance letter-writing manuals. In his popular textbook
De conscribendis epistolis (1522), Erasmus of Rotterdam lists three rhetoricalfunctional categories of letters: demonstrative, judicial and persuasive.3 These
categories closely resemble, but do not translate directly into the three well-known
language functions described by Karl Bühler in the 1930s: descriptive, expressive and
appellative. Bühler provides the backdrop against which Alexander Bergs, whose
data come from the fifteenth-century English Paston family, discusses the communicative and pragmatic functions of letters. Bergs refrains from making a distinction between genres (or registers) defined using extralinguistic criteria, and (intra-)
linguistically defined text types. He argues that both are relevant and need to be
combined, regardless of whether we discuss “super text types” such as letters,
sermons, recipes and novels, or their various subtypes.
Apart from petitions, which constitute a super text type of their own, Bergs
postulates five socio-pragmatic subtypes of letters: reports, requests, orders, counsel
and phatic letters. These are defined in terms of Bühler’s basic functions and
writer-addressee relations. Reports, for instance, are thus descriptive and neutral;


Introduction

requests appellative and from social inferiors to superiors; and orders appellative
and from social superiors to inferiors. Social status and role differences are
reflected in the correspondents’ lexical and grammatical choices and so socially
condition the linguistic expression of pragmatic functions. Ultimately, linguistic
variation within each subtype would depend on the degree to which writers
accommodated to their addressees.
Bergs assumes that “apart from subtle stylistic differences, different sociopragmatic text types should correlate at least to some extent with certain salient
linguistic variables”. In order to test this hypothesis he analyses third-person plural

personal pronouns and relative markers, contrasting the incidence of older forms
with incoming ones. These pilot studies suggest some interesting trends but show
no strong correlation between socio-pragmatic text types and these linguistic
variables. More work is obviously required here. Bergs himself regards a prototype
approach as one promising direction for future research.
Another way forward would be to analyse the lexical features characteristic of
the different subtypes, including the speech acts associated with them. Historical
speech-act research has intensified over recent years, and provides signposts to go
by (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2000, Fitzmaurice 2002). Although indirect speech acts
will cause problems, Kohnen’s study (2002) suggests that direct speech acts were
probably more common in the past than they are now. Bergs paves the way for this
approach by equating Bühler’s functions with speech-act types as he notes that
“descriptive texts contain more representative speech acts, expressive texts more
expressive speech acts, and appellative texts more directives”.
3.3 Letter writing as social and discursive practice
A framework such as critical discourse analysis (CDA) can prove illuminating for
an overall view of letter writing as situated activity. In her study of Margaret
Paston’s fifteenth-century correspondence, Johanna Wood refers to Norman
Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of discourse (1992), which approaches texts
not only in terms of their linguistic properties but also suggests that texts are social
and discursive acts. An analysis of fifteenth-century letters as social practice cannot
overlook the late medieval social hierarchy reflected in forms of address, for
instance, and will need to account for the role played by gender in letter writing in
England at the time. Wide-ranging female illiteracy meant that only a handful of
the women’s letters in the Paston collection were written by the women themselves.
This becomes relevant when we turn to the discursive practice of letter writing.
In late medieval England it includes special circumstances in letter production.
Margaret Paston’s messages were mediated through a scribe and, at a time before
the services of the post office, by a carrier of the letter (‘courier’) or a messenger.

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Since we may assume, if not with certainty, that Margaret Paston dictated her
letters, she was responsible for the wording of her letters but not for their spelling.
As Wood points out, the extent to which she was also responsible for routine
rhetorical formulae remains unclear. Her letters contain the usual greeting and
closing formulae such as “no more to you at this time”, but their middle part is
long and unorganised, and does not follow dictaminal conventions. Both Bergs and
Wood note that letters like this would be hard to classify into any particular
functional category.
In Fairclough’s model, text analysis refers to the lexical, grammatical, cohesive
and text structural properties of texts. He also distinguishes three other aspects of
texts that relate more to discursive practice than to text analysis: the ‘force’ of
utterances (speech acts), coherence and intertextuality (Fairclough 1992: 75). By
analysing how Margaret Paston addresses her correspondents and how she is in
turn addressed by them, Wood shows how she positions herself and how she is
positioned by her family in the social world of her day. The analysis reveals the
estimation in which she was held by her husband and sons, and the multiple social
roles she had in her family.
Another contribution informed by Fairclough’s analytic framework is SannaKaisa Tanskanen’s paper on intertextuality in the correspondence of Lady Katherine Paston, a distant seventeenth-century relative of Margaret Paston. In Bakhtinian terms, intertextuality means the ways in which texts “are shaped by prior texts
that they are ‘responding’ to, and by subsequent texts that they ‘anticipate’”
(Fairclough 1992: 101). Tanskanen’s analysis shows how intertextual links in letters
consist of references to other letters. The categories of links established are:
acknowledgement of receipt, references to the recipient’s or writer’s previous letters
or letters written by a third party, references to future or planned letters, and

references to the current letter.
The receipt of the preceding letter was routinely acknowledged in family and
business correspondence in the fifteenth century, but it was not compulsory
(Sánchez Roura 2002). Tanskanen approaches this intertextual category in terms
of social practice, there being no guarantee that a letter could be delivered safely
in the early modern period. As direct acknowledgements of receipt are quite rare
in Lady Katherine Paston’s letters, however, indirect means of assuring the
recipients of the safe delivery of their messages are looked for — and found — in
her correspondence.
References to the current letter, which Tanskanen includes as a case apart,
constitute the largest category in her material. Some of them may also be related to
letter writing as a social practice. Lady Katherine Paston frequently apologises for
her bad writing, which may be a sign of her measuring her writing ability against an
educated norm, which even women of her rank could rarely attain in seventeenth-


Introduction

century England. On the other hand, some of the references may also be part of the
discursive practice of letter writing. Lady Katherine occasionally puts her bad
writing down to haste, which combines the conventionalised apologies for bad
writing and haste found in English correspondence from the fifteenth century on
(Austin 1973 [1998: 342–345]).
3.4 Audience design and epistolary politeness
Epistolary conventions can also be approached from the perspective of the audience, both the recipients of the letters and others with access to them. Minna
Nevala applies Allan Bell’s audience design model (2001) in comparing the forms
used in the salutation and in the body of the letter with the superscription found on
the outside of it. In her discussion of the general principles according to which
address terms were constructed, she refers to the concept of face and the notions of
positive and negative politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987). Nevala’s material,

which comes from the electronic Corpus of Early English Correspondence (CEEC),
consists of over 3,000 private letters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
(for the corpus, see Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003).
Besides the addressee, a letter may be exposed to various categories of outsiders, in Bell’s terms, “auditors”, “overhearers” and “eavesdroppers”, according to
whether their involvement is known and ratified. The superscription outside the
letter particularly is accessible to all these categories, but in earlier times personal
letters were often shared with the addressee’s immediate circle of family and
friends, which also increased their exposure to ratified and known auditors.
Nevala finds that, although the address forms inside the letter vary according to
the correspondents’ social status and mutual relationship, they are always addresseeoriented. Between those equal in power, distance typically determines the choice in
that as the distance between correspondents grows, address terms become more
deferential, and the number of alternatives decreases. The opposite, close distance,
is reflected in first names and kinship terms and an increasingly creative use of
nicknames and terms of endearment. By contrast, the necessary exposure of the
superscription of the letter to unknown and unratified parties is reflected in the
increasing fixity of address forms in the eighteenth century; the writers’ friendship
or kinship is no longer acknowledged on the outside of the letter, as was often the
case in the previous century. This means that close and distant addressees become
undifferentiated in superscriptions, and forms of address inside and outside the
letter grow more asymmetrical in familiar letters. In politeness terms, while positively polite terms prevail inside familiar letters, negative politeness becomes the norm
on the outside in all kinds of correspondence.
Annemieke Bijkerk traces the rise of the letter-closing formulae yours sincerely

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and yours affectionately in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century letters. She begins
with the assumption, suggested by Tieken-Boon van Ostade (1999), that yours
sincerely and yours affectionately were introduced as positive politeness markers in
the early eighteenth century when your most humble servant and its variants were
still common even in letters exchanged by friends and social equals. Having
analysed a vast amount of data including the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Online
collections and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, Bijkerk is able to
date the first instances of yours affectionately to the early seventeenth century. Her
data also agree with Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s finding that yours sincerely
emerged in the early eighteenth century, thus antedating the OED by about a
hundred years. But it is not until the latter half of the eighteenth century that yours
sincerely and yours affectionately were generalised in private letters and other
similar kinds of writing.
3.5 Between public and private: early scientific correspondence
Studies of letter writing often make a distinction between private and non-private,
public or official letters (see 2, above). This simple dichotomy is called into
question by Ellen Valle’s paper on early scientific correspondence. Valle argues that
there was no clear-cut distinction between an informal or “contingent repertoire”
and a formal “empirical repertoire” in eighteenth-century scientific correspondence. She examines this duality in a corpus of letters in natural history relating
them to activities in and around the Royal Society. The correspondence constitutes
a form of social practice within a discourse community, which in Valle’s data has a
colonial dimension as the letters she studies were exchanged by British naturalists
and their suppliers of plant and animal specimens in North America.
By the eighteenth century, the discourse community in natural history had
become truly global because it involved collecting new species and other specimens
in the overseas colonies and transporting them to Europe, where they were named
and classified, and put on display in private collections. At the more formal end,
accounts and papers related to these activities, sometimes in epistolary form, were
published in books and journals such as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society. At the informal end, letters circulated among a small correspondence

network. As in the personal correspondence discussed in Nevala’s study, the
distance between the writers determined the level of (in)formality in these letters.
These two kinds could however also be mixed when informal personal news was
included at the beginning of the letter and scientific matter in a more formal style
in the middle.
Valle’s illustrative material comes from the correspondence of Peter Collinson,
a London merchant, and John Bartram, a Pennsylvania farmer with a supplement


Introduction

of letters by John Ellis, another London merchant, and Alexander Garden, a
Scottish-born physician in South Carolina. The fact that Collinson often presented
Bartram’s letters in Royal Society meetings may account for the fact that they are
more carefully constructed with report-like parts than his own, more mixed letters
to Bartram. The letters that were published in Philosophical Transactions were
usually edited at least orthographically and typographically, and the more personal
matter was omitted. Part of the business of determining the discursive practices in
the production of eighteenth-century scientific correspondence is therefore
unravelling the roles played by the recipient of the letter, the editor of the Royal
Society, and the printer — a process as intricate as tracing the various “text
producers” of Margaret Paston’s fifteenth-century correspondence discussed in
Wood’s contribution.

4. Concluding remarks
The variety of ways in which epistolary activity can be contextualised derives from its
diverse nature as social and discursive practice. The approaches adopted by the
contributors to this volume range from analyses of language contact and basic
language functions to critical discourse analysis, audience design and linguistic
politeness. This rich contextualisation both distances letter writing away from its past

as a branch of rhetoric and sheds new light on its conventional aspects. Viewed from
these perspectives, writing letters becomes highly context-sensitive social interaction.
The shift of focus from letters as products to letter writing as an activity shows the
extent to which writers are the agents responsible for the outcome of the process.

Notes
1. I would like to thank Professor Martti Nissinen for kindly making the text available to me; for
a discussion of the material, see Nissinen (2000). The State Archives of Assyria project is introduced at: sinki.fi/science/saa/cna.html
2. The editors of this volume organised a seminar on Letter Writing Matters at the Second
International Conference on Organization in Discourse in Turku, Finland, in 2002. Most of the
contributions to this volume, previously printed as as special issue of the Journal of Historical
Pragmatics (2004, 5:2), have grown out of papers presented at this seminar.
3. Erasmus’ demonstrative letters comprise “accounts of persons, regions, estates, castles, springs,
gardens, mountains, prodigies, storms, journeys, banquets, buildings and processions” (1522
[1985]: 71). The judicial category consists of letters of accusation, complaint, defence, protest,
justification, reproach, threat, invective and entreaty; and the persuasive category includes letters
of conciliation, reconciliation, encouragement, discouragement, persuasion, dissuasion,
consolation, petition, recommendation, admonition, and the amatory letter. Many similar
classifications appear in early modern letter-writing manuals.

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Power and politeness
Languages and salutation formulas
in correspondence between
Sweden and the German Hanse
Seija Tiisala
University of Helsinki

The power structures in northern Baltic Europe in the Middle Ages can be
studied through the correspondence between the Swedish authorities and the
Hanseatic Councils. The letters were written in three languages: Latin, Low
German and Swedish. Low German was the dominant language in the correspondence from the fifteenth century onwards. The aim of the paper is to examine the ways in which power relationships are manifested, including choice of
language, conventional expressions of politeness, use of laudatory adjectives
when addressing the recipient, use of adverbs to express deference or hedging,
and elaborations in orthography.
Medieval letter-writing followed models described in various instruction
books called summae dictaminis. These reflect the hierarchy of medieval society

by classifying senders and recipients of letters according to their social position,
and giving instructions for address of one group by another. The European
tradition of rules for letter writing can be traced back in an unbroken line to the
Roman Empire, and in spite of certain local differences most rules concerning
the form of the letter and expressions of politeness were shared all over the
continent.

1.

Introduction

In medieval times, northern Baltic Europe was a multilingual area where three
languages were used in written communication: Latin, Low German and Swedish.
Documents in other languages spoken around the northern Baltic Sea, such as
Finnish and Estonian, are of a later date than those in Swedish and Low German.
Written material from the Middle Ages was preserved only to a limited extent in
Sweden; according to some estimations, less than five percent of all medieval texts


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produced survive. Extant letters and charters from this time consist chiefly of
documents of legal value, often concerning transfer of property. These texts played
an important role in the advancement of literacy in Sweden (Larsson 2003: 115).
The material analysed in this study consists of official and semi-official letters
concerning matters in Finland, originating both in Sweden and the German Hanse.

We will use the term Hanseatic letters to designate these letters, which were
exchanged between individuals outside the Hanse (representatives of the Swedish
crown, bishops and other clerics in high positions and merchants) and the Hanse
(that is, Hanse councils, chiefly in Tallinn which was then known as Reval, and
Hanseatic merchants). The letters having to do with Finland have been published
in Finlands Medeltidsurkunder I–VIII (abbreviated as FMU), which contains
approximately 800 letters in every volume, written in Latin, Swedish and Low
German. The letters are printed in chronological order, with the earliest letters
from the thirteenth century and the latest ones from 1530 in volume VIII. The
Hanseatic letters are actually a minority of the texts reproduced in FMU; the bulk
of the volumes consists of different kinds of charters, that is to say letters with legal
consequences. We will not be concerned with these, but only with the smaller
number of epistles or personal letters having no direct legal consequences.
The material analysed is thus restricted to northern Baltic Europe, the time
span to approximately 1350–1530, the time when the Hanse was an important
power factor in the area, and the genre to epistles.
The aims of the paper are threefold: to study the choice of languages in
personal (but not private) correspondence in the area during the Hanseatic period;
to consider how language choice reflects the power structures in the area; and to
analyse the formulaic expressions in the protocol part of the letters, especially the
address and salutatio, in order to determine how closely the writers followed
politeness conventions established in the medieval books on letter writing called
summae dictaminis.1 The strict rules in these books concerning addressing and
greeting the recipient show how the power relationships between sender and
recipient should be expressed in a way that appropriately reflects these power
relationships in reality.

2. Language situation in the area
The languages used in the Hanseatic correspondence were Latin, Low German and
Swedish. Of the 150 letters from the Hanse, 135 are in Low German, 15 in Latin

and none in Swedish. There are no letters in Latin in the material from 1431 to
1529 (volumes III–VII), but four Latin letters can be found in the material printed
in the last volume of FMU (vol. VIII, 1519–1530). Of the 560 extant letters from


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Power and politeness

the Swedish side, 476 are written in Low German, 56 in Swedish and 28 in Latin.
The first Swedish letters date from 1431, there are no letters in Latin from 1431 to
1529, but two appear in the same time period as the last letters in Latin from the
Hanse (see Tiisala 1996: 281 for more detailed statistics).
Other languages were spoken in the area, including Finnish, which was the
language of the majority of the population in Finland and a minority in Sweden.
There was also an influential German speaking minority, especially in urban
areas.2 In other words, Sweden-Finland was already a multilingual and multiethnic society at this time. Finnish, although not used in written contacts, had a
certain status in Hanseatic communication, because some of the burghers and
representatives of the nobility in Finland, and above all many of the potential
customers for the Hanse in Finland, were Finnish speakers. The language situation
can be illustrated by a letter written at the beginning of the sixteenth century by a
merchant in Danzig who sent his two sons to Archdeacon Scheel in Turku (Åbo),
to be taught Latin, Finnish and Swedish:3
(1) dat he de sprake mochte leren fijnijch; vnd, so ijk heret, hebbe gij bij juw wol
stoddenten, de en noch mochte leren swedijsche breffe mochte leren, vnd fijnnijch ok so wat lattijnesch; he chan jo wat worsoket, wen en sal he eyn choppman werden, so ijs ijt em ganch nwtte. …Effte gij beter rat wessten, dar bijdde
ijk ijw fruntlijch wme effte gij en depper jnt lant ssenden wme de sprake. (FMU
VII: 5687, 1513)
‘… that he would learn Finnish; and you have, so I have heard, students who
could also teach him to write Swedish letters, and Finnish and some Latin;

he can try to learn some, if he is going to be a merchant it is useful for him.
… In case you find it advisable I request you to send him deeper into the
country for the language’s sakes’.

Low German had been the language of prestige in Hanseatic Northern Europe ever
since Latin had lost its dominant position, a process which started in northern
Germany in the 1250s, and reached its conclusion in the fifteenth century (Peters
1985: 1214–1216). North German merchants and artisans migrated to Sweden in
considerable numbers beginning in the eleventh century, and as a result of this
movement the upper classes (including the nobility) and some of the burghers in
Sweden and Finland are believed to have become bilingual in the higher status
language of Low German (Peters 1985: 1212).
Swedish, on the other hand, was still the language of administration in the
realm. It was used in the legal code as early as the thirteenth century, and in the
middle of the fourteenth century the king (Magnus Eriksson) handed down laws
requiring all texts having legal significance to be written in Swedish. The language
was also used in the translation of religious texts, and by the indigenous families who
formed most of the nobility at the time. All these factors contributed to the relatively

15


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Seija Tiisala

high status of Swedish. But in written contacts with the powerful Hanse it was rarely

used; normally only in cases when the sender did not have a German secretary at
hand, when the Swedish sender was annoyed or when he had some urgent information to give to the advantage of the Hanseatic recipient. It must be noted that the
Hanse never wrote letters in Swedish to Swedish officials, or at least no such letters
can be found in FMU. There is even a suggestion that it was considered impolite to
write in Swedish to the Hanseatic Councils: A letter written by the powerful
nobleman Krister Nilsson ends with an apology for writing in Swedish, the reason
being that there was no German secretary at hand at the castle (FMU III:2168,
1436). The Hanse never apologises for writing in German, which indicates the
difference in status between the two languages in the Baltic area at this time.
How is a language situation like this possible, where one language community
writes to another in a language they do not share, and expects to be understood?
Kurt Braunmüller describes this as a situation of “semicommunication”, a term
first used by Einar Haugen (Braunmüller 1995: 308). The participants on both sides
were used to varieties within their own systems, for the idea of a strict norm in
vernaculars emerged only later. Thus they were able to tolerate more “noise” in
communication than we are today. They could accept a situation where a counterpart answered in another language that was closely related and consequently
typologically and lexically similar to the recipient’s mother tongue. This type of
communication is not unknown in present-day Scandinavia. People were also
more able and willing to learn certain rules of transposition between closely related
languages when the alternative was learning a more distantly related lingua franca,
in this case Latin.
Latin came later to Sweden than to Denmark, and its position seems to have
been weaker (Tengström 1973: 107), according to the familiar centre-periphery
pattern. In the early Middle Ages, few clerks in Sweden knew Latin well enough to
use it in high-quality written communication. And with the coming of the Reformation in the late Middle Ages, Latin lost its position in Scandinavia in general.
Nevertheless, Latin was the main language of Hanseatic correspondence until the
middle of the fourteenth century, and had some status throughout the rest of the
Hanseatic period as a language of communication (cf. letters from Hans Chonnert
to Archdeacon Scheel, FMU VII:5459, 1510 and 5687, 1513).
The Swedish letters written to the Hanse are not entirely in Swedish; they

contain a notable amount of code-switching. The intitulatio, address, and date are
practically always in Latin, which hardly ever happens in the German letters. Very
few letters written entirely in Swedish can be found in the Hanseatic material. One
possible interpretation is that the Latin phrases were used to give the letters a
higher stylistic nuance, since Latin still had a great deal of prestige as the language
of learning.